Sunday, July 31, 2011

The Query Goblin had been suffering a very empty maw for several weeks when Tracey put a single endorsement for it on Query Tracker, and BOOM! The Goblin's tummy was abruptly full-to-bursting with delicious queries!

In other news, I'm in that stage of writing wherein I wonder if I'm delusional.

In other words, I'm editing what is inching toward becoming a final draft, and I'm liking it! And then I'm second-guessing myself!

Because the problem with having birthed anything is you're kinda prone to adoring it unconditionally. I really don't know if I'm being objective about the merits of this manuscript, so I intend to put it away for a month, write other things, then come back to do a hopefully-more-objective final pass.

Erm, but in the meanwhile, would anyone be willing to critique the first scene of my science fiction novel titled The Blooddrinker and the War Angel?

You can get to it via the link below, but you'll have to come back to this post to leave your critique. Anonymous comments are on, however, so let fly! I really do want to hear what you think, good or bad. :)

A researcher wondered to what degree words can influence actions. He sent a questionnaire to voters on the day before an election asking them a question worded in one of two different ways.

The first way was: "How important is it to you to vote in the upcoming election?"

The next day, 82% of the people who answered that question actually went out and voted.

The second version of the questionnaire instead said: "How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?"

96% of those people voted.

The researcher did three versions of this study, and the results were robust: Yes, wording matters. By using a noun instead of a verb, the questionnaire was able to encourage people to identify more strongly with the idea of being someone who votes.

The article is worth reading because it outlines why the researcher thinks this works--what the psychology behind the effect is--and that may give you ideas for how to reveal character in your writing. The rule of thumb is that when someone says, "I am a [noun]", they care more deeply than someone who says, "I [verb]."

~~~~~~~

And since I'm discussing the power of words, here's an interesting article on the predictive power of words. It may be possible, by analyzing the wording used by journalists talking about the economy, to predict some of the behaviour of the stock market:

There's controversy over whether addiction should be called a disease. Some people think about how they define the word "disease" and decide that addiction doesn't count.

For this post, I won't call addiction a disease, and this is not to imply it is or isn't, but only to keep that word from being a distraction from what I'm trying to say.

When a person becomes addicted to a substance, it's no longer a matter of willpower or choice. It's a matter of biology and chemistry.

Addiction means the person's body has re-calibrated itself and now considers the drug crucial to its survival. The person's mind--what they want, how they'd like to live their life--has become mostly irrelevant. Addicts truly do lose control of their actions.

I want to explain the science of what happens when a person becomes addicted to heroin, because I think heroin provides an analogy that makes it a bit easier--for a person who has never been addicted to anything--to understand how hard it is to kick a drug habit.

There are things in your bloodstream called sugar receptors that help you digest sugar. Heroin is chemically similar to a sugar your body metabolizes naturally--so much so, that heroin can latch onto your sugar receptors even though it doesn't quite fit them.

But heroin is chemically active. It alters your sugar receptor to make it effectively a heroin receptor. If enough receptors become altered, not only is your ability to process sugar impaired, but your body now considers heroin an essential nutrient--something it will die without.

Would you have enough willpower to starve yourself to death if you knew where to find food?

That's how much willpower a heroin addict needs to kick their habit. When they quit the drug, their body is convinced it's dying for lack of an essential nutrient. It uses every evolved response it has, every trick in its arsenal, to coerce the addict into getting more heroin.

So again--could you starve yourself to death? In the presence of food? Think how desperate you would feel, because that's the desperation a junkie feels; their body is using that same response on them, trying to drive them to take the drug.

If your answer is no, you couldn't voluntarily starve to death (or couldn't do it easily), then have empathy for addicts, because when you look at them, you're looking in a mirror. That person is you, if you'd had the bad luck, poor judgement, or youthful naivete to wind up addicted to a drug. Their body is designed the same way yours is; it could have been you.

And I'm not even done telling you about heroin.

Suppose a heroin addict kicks their habit, fixes their life, and goes on to live a clean and meaningful existence. Remember those altered sugar receptors? Those hang around in the body for years.

When a person kicks a heroin habit, their cravings decrease sharply in the first few weeks, and more slowly over the next few months, but they never go away. A person who has been sufficiently addicted to heroin will crave the drug for the rest of their life.

Also, because heroin is similar to a natural sugar, sweet foods can trigger withdrawal symptoms even years later. Imagine having successfully kicked a heroin habit at 20 years of age, then eating a candy bar at 40 years of age and going into withdrawal symptoms again. (And, by the way, heroin withdrawal is nasty.)

How abjectly unfair--and there's only biology and chemistry to blame for it. Same as for the original addiction.

Note I'm not talking about drug abuse, here. Drug abuse often leads to addiction, but addiction is a separate issue--addiction is the state of one's body physically craving a drug, regardless of what one's mind desires. Abuse, in the absence of addiction, is still a person's choice.

Addiction is certainly different than a disease like appendicitis, because appendicitis happens to people who have done nothing to increase their risk of getting it. Addiction requires conscious action, at least to begin with.

However, appendicitis doesn't make you feel worse when you're getting better. Addiction makes you feel horrible when you try to get better.

And appendicitis doesn't feel good when you're actively aggravating it. When an addict uses, they get a moment's relief--even though they're digging themselves in deeper. It's a heartbreaking Catch-22.

I'm not going to make a call on whether addiction should be called a disease because I have no expertise on this matter. I've never been addicted; no one I cherish has ever struggled with addiction (that I know of.)

But in general, if you want to know what something is like, you ask an expert, and in this case, that means an addict or a recovering addict.

And if they say addiction is a disease, then that's probably the truth, isn't it? They would know better than we who sit by the sidelines of dangerous living and wonder what it's like.

What makes us all human (and, in some cases, what makes us writers) is an ability to empathize and a willingness to understand someone else's struggle. Humanity has many strengths--intelligence, courage, artistry, athletic prowess--but the one attribute we have that the world always needs more of is kindness.

So please, always remember, when you see someone made pathetic, grotesque or even dangerous by their addiction, they're responding to it roughly the way you would if you had been unlucky or unwise enough to get yourself into that state. You're looking in a mirror to an alternate universe--one that shows you, if things had gone wrong.

Amy Winehouse was a beautiful woman who apparently felt ugly, a talented woman who thought she was worthless, an addict. Her body yearned for substances that eventually tore away everything her heart and mind had yearned for. Have empathy for her; what a terrible thing.

May she have peace now, and may her example give other addicts the will and courage to fight their way free. Amen.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Hurrah! I finished my first draft for my WIP this week! Sha-boogaloos and happy dances for everyone!

I'm pretty pleased with what's there, too. Fingers crossed, and touch wood for good measure, but I'm hoping the edits will be fairly painless.

The following quotation by E. L. Doctorow sums up what the experience of writing this book has been like:

It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Word. With this novel, it seemed like I was never very sure what was going to happen next. I had a vague idea of what the ending was going to be and what the characters were going to experience--and that was it. I brainstormed every new scene as I came to it.

And it's not that I didn't try to outline the novel in advance--it's just I finally realized I might as well be struggling to write the book instead of struggling to write the outline.

I'm not really a seat-of-the-pants writer. I do need to know what the scene I'm going to write contains before I start typing it up. However, I'm obviously not quite a plotter either. And although I find it anxiety-inducing to not know where a story is going, maybe this isn't such a bad way to do things.

When I write scene by scene, I'm always focused on this moment. I have to concentrate on making the scene pop to life and feel immediate because--Gandalf and Yoda preserve me--it's all I've got. I cannot skip ahead. There is no "ahead". Not yet. Big ol' black hole waiting to eat me, right there.

I think most writers fall somewhere between the extremes of "Seat Of Ma Pants, OMG" and "Full Metal Outline". Where do you fall, and how do you split things up? When do you sit down and brainstorm, and at what point do you just dive in and write? Do you always do things one way, or does it change from project to project? I'd love to hear about your technique.

P.S. - I just finished A Dance With Dragons, and George R. R. Martin is an evil, evil, black-hearted man. Oh, how I love him and his wonderful books!

Sunday, July 10, 2011

So part of the reason I haven't been online much the past few weeks is I took an utterly lovely trip to Italy. El Husbando speaks Italian, so we didn't book any tours but just got a room in Florence, took a day trip to Pisa while we were there (including a visit to the towns of Sienna and San Gimignano), then had a room in Venice for the rest of the trip.

Since we didn't do an official tour, I don't have a lot of information on the stuff we saw, so here's a pic-spam post showing you some of the highlights. It might be more fun this way!

This is the Arno river on the night we arrived in Florence

In Italy, the insides of churches are like classical art galleries.

The front of El Duomo, the cathedral in Florence

More of El Duomo in Florence

Pretty building in Florence

Rooftops in Florence

A pretty building in Florence

I believe this is a courtyard that is part of the Uffizi Gallery; it's certainly right beside to the building where the gallery is housed, but I'm unsure whether they're officially part of the same complex.

Across the Arno river, the city gets a bit more rural (and less touristy; it's nice!)

Another scene while we were across the Arno river (there is city there too, but green spaces like this one also.)

A parade in Florence. These fellows were tossing their flags high in the air as they walked.

The start of our day trip to Pisa: This is in the main square of the town of Sienna, which was rich enough at one point that they tried to rival Rome. Then the black plague came along and left everybody either dead or broke--usually dead.

This is the fountain in the main square of Sienna.

This is the bell tower for Sienna's cathedral, which we were going to see. (Note the swallows and the moon!)

This is the front of Sienna's cathedral

The bell-tower of Sienna's cathedral

The inside of Sienna's cathedral

A painted roof inside the library in Sienna's cathedral

A view of wine country as we're driving toward San Gimignano

San Gimignano is a medieval city that is preserved but still has people living in it. Very quaint and cute place!

The cathedral at Pisa with the leaning tower in the background. And here, you see why El Husbando froths about my tendency to take crooked shots. Yes, the tower is supposed to be leaning--but the cathedral is not!

The leaning tower of Pisa--leaning slightly more than usual due to my incompetence with a camera.

The inside of Pisa's cathedral

The inside of Pisa's cathedral

A door at Pisa, possibly on the cathedral

Okay, we're back in Florence! El Duomo is the main cathedral in Florence, and we walked right up to the top of the dome. That's a bit less than 600 steps, and most of them are in these tiny, claustrophobic spiral staircases or along steps where you have to crouch because the dome is curving right over your shoulder. It was cool! Well--sweaty and a lot of work, to be accurate--but you know what I mean!

This image is of the paintings on the inside of the dome, which you get to see right up close when you do the walk-up to the top of the dome. The daylight you see at the top is the level where we ended up.

View of El Duomo's bell-tower from the top of the cathedral's dome

View of Santa Croce from the top of El Duomo

Here's what half the stairwells looked like when you climbed to the top of El Duomo in Florence

Now we're in Venice! It was the height of tourist season, so some of the canals looked like conveyor belts of gondolas at certain times of the day. No, we did not take a gondola ride--it works out to being about $150 (100 Euro) for a 40 minute ride. We knew we would enjoy it, but that much...?

San Marco in Venice; there seemed to be a lot of work being done (cleaning? restoration?), so unfortunately quite a few of the landmarks in this piazza had plastic sheeting up over them.

A detail on the cathedral of San Marco in Venice

The Doge's palazzo (Duke's palace) in Venice

A view from inside the Doge's palazzo (where you're not actually supposed to take photos--shh!)

The gold-and-glass mosaic tiles of the ceiling inside San Marco's cathedral--where, um, you're also not supposed to take photos.

The ceiling in one of the museums that rings San Marco piazza, where...look, as far as criminal behaviour in foreign countries is concerned, taking photos when you're not supposed to ain't that bad, okay?

View along the grand canal in Venice (where you are allowed to take photos!)

View across the grand canal in Venice

The inside of one of the cathedrals in Venice. They have SO. MANY. CHURCHES.

Inside a completely different church in Venice

A Venetian mask in a store window. You can also see some glass beads; Venice is famous for its blown glass.

This is a public sculpture on nearby Murano Island, which is famous for being where all of Venice's famous blown glass comes from.

The view coming back to Venice from Murano Island on the vaporetto (ferry.)

And finally--I don't usually post photos of myself on the internet--but here's me eating a meringue cookie that's nearly as big as my head!

Pageloads since 01/01/2009:

About Me

I'm an unpublished writer--no, don't run away! I also have a master's degree in physics, some decent skills as a visual artist, and I can tell grand old stories about the days when I used to rock climb. See? Fully-rounded human being! Not (very) flakey at all.